Help/advice using iPhoto library manager

Question

I got the pay version of iPhoto library manager, and it seems to work well. But I'm looking for some advice on how to best organize my photos between the two libraries. I'm using the following basic system:
I have my entire photo library containing all my photos on my external drive, and I named this library Lacie.
Then I have a subset of my photos, basically my favorites and recent photos, on my laptop. This library is called Macbook. I am running low on space on my laptop (and soon will be running out on my external too and will need to get another one, but I can probably put that off for a bit).
When I import photos, I usually import them onto my macbook, play around with the events, delete fuzzy photos, etc. Then periodically I move the new events over to my Lacie drive so that everything is on Lacie. I then delete photos that I don't like that much to make space on my Macbook.
Now here's the problem. I went on a trip to France and I put all my photos on my Macbook, and I moved the events over to Lacie. Then at one point I organized all the france photos on my Macbook into albums. Now I'm trying to move that organization to Lacie, so I tried to drag those albums over to Lacie using Library Manager. However, it asks if I want to import duplicate photos and I don't, so nothing ends up happening except that empty albums are created. Is there a way to do this, or do I need to do all of my organization directly on my Lacie? Any advice about better ways to organize this? I'm new to this multiple libraries thing so maybe other people have worked out better systems.
Thanks!

Answer 1

Ok, so, say I import a bunch of photos from a trip. I have these photos in events by day, say 7 days worth of events. Now I want to put some of them in albums: photos to send to mom, photos to post to flickr, etc. I don't necessarily want all of them to go into albums, but I don't want to lose the ones that don't go into a particular album. What's the best way to copy those over to the Lacie once I'm done? Is it better to make one folder with all the photos from that week and then have albums within it containing the subcategories, so that I can just copy all the albums? If I copy the albums and then also copy the events, will that work?
I guess mainly what's bugging me is that in iPhoto, photos exist in events and then are also organized into albums, like the library and playlists in iTunes. Having to think about them as separate things to copy over is confusing and I'm not sure how best to do it. I want to keep the organization in events AND albums without having duplicate photos taking up space.